German Politics and Society

This theme issue of German Politics and Society, “The Dilemmas of

Commemoration: German Debates on the Holocaust in the 1990s,”

features a collection of articles on the politics of memory and the

debates surrounding the Berlin Holocaust memorial. Compiled

under Christhard Hoffmann’s able direction, the issue presents the

work of five eminent scholars who address this painful but essential

topic from the perspectives of their various disciplines. The project

began at a UC Berkeley workshop in March 1998. We are pleased to

present the reworked, updated collection to our readership and thus

reward this worthy endeavor with the audience that the topic and

these articles deserve.

A few weeks after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany

in May 1949, American High Commissioner John McCloy addressed

an assembly of representatives from the West German Jewish community.

In a much-discussed speech, he emphasized the central

importance of public recollection of the crimes of the Third Reich for

the political culture of the young republic. In particular, said McCloy,

the relationship of West Germany towards the Jews would be “one of

the real touchstones and the test of Germany’s progress toward the

light. The moment that Germany has forgotten the Buchenwalds and

Auschwitzes, that was the point at which everyone could begin to

despair of any progress in Germany.”

The legacies of almost a half-century of divided memory continue to

influence commemoration of the Holocaust in unified Germany.

Because these practices were decisively shaped by the multiple

restorations of past political traditions in the early postwar period, I

will comment on the commemorations of the first two postwar

decades in East and West Germany and conclude with brief remarks

about how past legacies influence recent practices. I will examine

the significance of the Holocaust in these events compared to the

attention given to the suffering of Nazi Germany’s non-Jewish victims.

I will also consider the extent to which distinctions were made

among the various victims of Nazi Germany, the kind of hierarchies

that were established among them, and the use of commemoration

for political purposes.

Over two years after the appearance of Hitler’s Willing Executioners,

very little can be heard about the so-called Goldhagen Debate in

Germany: no more scholarly reviews, at most a few echoes here and

there. Over two hundred thousand copies of the book were sold,

and it was certainly read almost as many times. But it does not

appear in the syllabi of university courses on the Holocaust, except

perhaps in those that cover historiographical debates. In the German

edition of Saul Friedländer’s new book, Nazi Germany and the Jews,

Daniel Goldhagen does not rate a mention, except for a three line

footnote on page 420 in which his theory is described as “unconvincing

on the basis of the materials presented as part of the study.”2

Goldhagen’s book, one can confidently predict, will not play a role

in future Holocaust research.

The question as to why a national monument to the “Murdered Jews

of Europe” should be erected in Berlin is multi-dimensional, and has

answers in political, cultural, and historical contexts. As most people

already know, I once took a hard stand against actually ever completing

a central memorial in Germany to the Holocaust. “Better a

thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions in Germany

than any final solution to Germany’s Holocaust memorial problem,”

I wrote many years ago. “Instead of a fixed icon for Holocaust memory

in Germany, the debate itself—perpetually unresolved amid everchanging

conditions—might now be enshrined.”

Few tools of Nazi propaganda were as potent or as permanent as

architecture. At the instigation of Hitler, who had once aspired to be

an architect, the Nazi regime placed unusual importance on the

design of environments—whether cities, buildings, parade grounds, or

highways—that would glorify the Third Reich and express its dynamic

relationship to both the past and the future. Architecture and urban

design were integral to the way the regime presented itself at home

and abroad. Newsreels supplemented direct personal experience of

monumental buildings. Designed to last a thousand years, these edifices

appeared to offer concrete testimony of the regime’s enduring

character. A more subtle integration of modern functions and vernacular

forms, especially in suburban housing, suggested that technological

progress could coexist with an “organic” national community

rooted in a quasi-sacred understanding of the landscape.

Since the 1960s, Germany’s historical culture has continually reprocessed

the Nazi past and later the Holocaust for the purposes of education,

remembrance, and entertainment. The objective of this process,

Vergangenheitsbewältigung, is the self-centered and self-designed

therapeutic treatment of the descendants of the perpetrators and

bystanders of Nazism. It seems that Germans, who were better fascists

than other Europeans, are also determined to excel at the task of

working through Nazism and the World War II era. Therefore,

attempts at mastering the past have given rise to hectic cultural activity

as the field of contemporary history illustrates: “[I]ncessantly the

German business for contemporary history generates fast-food products.

It is based on a perpetual mobile of commissions, projects and

mini-grants, temporary employment and welfare-to-work subsidies,

conferences and lecture series—a perpetual mobile of pedagogical historiography

and history obsessed pedagogy.”

The overwhelming critical response in Germany to the publication of

Victor Klemperer’s journals, particularly those spanning the years

from 1933 to 1945, has been a veritable sensation. Hundreds of

reviews, mostly appreciations, have appeared. Klemperer’s journals

have also turned into big business. On October 12, 1999, the German

television channel ARD began broadcasting a thirteen-episode series

on the diaries in the most expensive, made-for-television program of

its kind in Germany. Additionally, the English-language rights to the

journals were sold to Random House for a record $550,000, more

than has ever been paid for translation rights of any German book in

history. The selling of Klemperer’s journals may have led to a distorted

evaluation of their author’s position and importance.

Peter Pulzer

The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment

After 75 Years edited by Manfred E. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser

Sheri Berman

Pädagogik im Spannungsfeld von Eugenik und Euthanasie: Die “Euthanasie”-Diskussion in der Weimarer Republik und zu Beginn der neunziger Jahre. Ein Beitrag zur Faschismusforschung und zur Historiographie der Behindertenpädagogik by Werner Brill

Thomas Banchoff

The Challenge of Globalization for Germany’s Social Democracy: A Policy Agenda for the 21st Century edited by Dieter Dettke

Robert Gerald Livingston

Fragments of Our Time: Memoirs of a Diplomat by Martin J. Hillenbrand

Hermann Beck

Germans into Nazis by Peter Fritzsche

Robin E. Judd

Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany by Marion A. Kaplan